1. The Bluebook will eventually abandon the dual typeface conventions for law-review style and practitioner style. It's just a matter of time.

2. The Bluebook publishers (students) will increasingly rely on professionals to help them. They are already using real lawyers and law professors as consultants. This will continue and increase.

3. The Bluebook will follow trends set or anticipated by the ALWD Citation Manual and by others. It will not lead.

So there.

Here is a good article about The Bluebook.  Christine Hurt, The Bluebook At Eighteen: Reflecting And Ratifying Current Trends In Legal Scholarship, 82 Ind. L. J. 49 (2007). Professor Hurt knows her stuff, and reading this article prompted me to make my predictions.

From the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog, news that a law firm's failure to meet a filing deadline, by one minute, on a motion has cost its client $1 million.    The firm had explained that its courier had "encountered 'unusually heavy traffic' and had to 'wait at the railroad crossing on Grand Avenue for a long train to pass.' Consequently, [the courier] arrived at the Courthouse after the office had closed and [the courier] was unable to file the motion until the following day, on October 11, 2007."  The judge concluded (opinion, pdf) that "the entirely foreseeable obstacle of traffic in Southern California in the late afternoon cannot justify an enlargement of time.”  Take those deadlines seriously, guys.

As an investor, you need to perform calculations and have a logical investment thesis. This is your left brain working. But you also need to be able to do things such as judging a management team from subtle cues they give off. You need to be able to step back and take a big picture view of certain situations rather than analyzing them to death. You need to have a sense of humor and humility and common sense. And most important, I believe you need to be a good writer. Look at Buffett; he's one of the best writers ever in the business world. It's not a coincidence that he's also one of the best investors of all time. If you can't write clearly, it is my opinion that you don't think very clearly.

The carnival-like he-said, she-said of the legality of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques has become a form of doublespeak worthy of Catch-22. Having been subjected to them all, I know these techniques, if in fact they are actually being used, are not dangerous when applied in training for short periods. However, when performed with even moderate intensity over an extended time on an unsuspecting prisoner – it is torture, without doubt. Couple that with waterboarding and the entire medley not only “shock the conscience” as the statute forbids -it would terrify you. Most people can not stand to watch a high intensity kinetic interrogation. One has to overcome basic human decency to endure watching or causing the effects. The brutality would force you into a personal moral dilemma between humanity and hatred. It would leave you to question the meaning of what it is to be an American.

In American politics, supply-side economics is the monster that will not die. The supply-side argument that, in the United States, tax-rate cuts pay for themselves—that, after cutting taxes, the government actually ends up with more revenue—has little or no support within the mainstream economic profession, and no hard empirical data to back it up. Myriad studies have demonstrated that both the Reagan tax cuts of the nineteen-eighties and the tax cuts put through under the current Administration shrank government revenues and led to bigger budget deficits.

Yet the absence of proof for supply-side theory has not dimmed Republicans’ devotion to it. Last month, President Bush told Fox News that his tax cuts had “yielded more tax revenues, which allows us to shrink the deficit.” Dick Cheney insists that “sensible tax cuts increase economic growth and add to the federal treasury.” Every major Republican Presidential candidate—including John McCain, who actually voted against Bush’s 2001 tax bill—is on the record as saying that tax cuts pay for themselves. And, just last week, a New York Sun editorial published a list of what “the Republican Party stands for.” First on the list? “Reductions in top marginal tax rates . . . lead to greater government revenues in the long run.”

This supply-side orthodoxy is striking in a couple of ways. First, it requires Republican politicians to commit themselves publicly to a position that is wrong—and wrong not as a matter of ideology or faith but as a matter of fact. Saying today that tax cuts will increase tax revenues is not like saying that bombing Iran constitutes a sensible foreign policy, or that education vouchers will wreck the public schools. It’s more like saying that the best way to treat sick people is to bleed them to let out the evil spirits. Second, despite the fact that the supply-side faith has no grounding in reality, within the Republican Party there is little room for dissent on the subject, as Jonathan Chait details in his new book, “The Big Con.” Last week, the blogger Megan McArdle wrote that she had a book review for an unnamed right-wing publication spiked because in it she dared suggest that, in the U.S., tax cuts decreased government revenues.

[A]t Deadspin . . . Will Leitch wrote, "We don't want to sound like the PC police here, but seriously now: Is it really OK for Indians fans to be dressing up in red face?"

I don't mind being called p.c. so I'll answer: No. It's not OK.

I suppose reasonable people can disagree about whether the team name Indians is offensive, but there's just no arguing about Chief Wahoo. It's a Little Black Sambo-style caricature that should have been retired decades ago. If those fans in Cleveland had been in minstrel-show blackface, ESPN never would have run a photo of them without comment, as simply a depiction of happy fans in the stands. The picture only would have run as the centerpiece of a story about fan racism.

And there is nothing about grinning-Indian redface that's even a little bit less racist than minstrel-show blackface.

You probably don't want to hear it, but if the Red Sox must lose to someone this year, let it be the Indians.

These people deserve it.

Only Cubs fans have waited longer for a championship than the Indians, who last won it all in 1948. These people have waited 43 years for a Cleveland team to be champions in anything. Like, how many people are left around here who actually saw Jim Brown play?

No one has more ably chronicled the Tribe's serialized failures than Terry Pluto of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Pluto authored the book The Curse of Rocky Colavito, which exhaustively covers every Cleveland misstep since the day of the fateful deal. Whether it's trading away a gifted young lefty named Tommy John in order to bring Colavito back to Cleveland, the flame-out of "can't miss" Cory Snyder or the tragic deaths of Steve Olin and Tim Crews, the Indians, according to Pluto's tome, are indeed a blighted lot. And that's not lost on the fans.

"When ESPN named Cleveland the most miserable sports city because of all the losing, barely edging out Philadelphia," says Pluto, "we were incredulous."

The source of the incredulity wasn't being named most miserable sports city. Rather, according to Pluto, it's that ESPN declared it to be any sort of close call.

"We'll stake our claim to being almost beyond cursed," Pluto says.

Still and yet, hope dies hard. Regularly, Pluto will get emails from Cleveland fans asking him — begging him, really — to assure them that one of the city's teams will win a championship before they die. His standard response: "How long do you plan to live?"

History notwithstanding, this year's Indians model has raised the hopes of Cleveland faithful. They're in the ALCS for the third time in 13 years, and while the mighty Boston Red Sox will be heavily favored, anything is possible when you've got C.C. Sabathia and Fausto Carmona at the front of the rotation. Moreover, as the St. Louis Cardinals proved last season, October is sometimes the province of underdogs.

As with any good curse, signs and portents abound. However, there's one sign — one in the late innings of Game 2 of the ALDS — that suggests perhaps this is Cleveland's year after all.

"When the bugs attacked Joba Chamberlain," says Pluto, "see, that's the kind of thing that would happen to the Indians in the past."

This morning on the listserv for legal writing professors I posted the following:

I wonder if anyone thinks I’m mistaken in a retaining a particular pet peeve: the use of “verbal” to mean “oral.”  I’ve always believed and taught that when people speak  of, for example, “verbal contracts,”  they are being ambiguous because “verbal” means “in words” and therefore refers to written as well as spoken expression.  “Oral” means “spoken.”  I even have regularly asked witnesses to clarify their testimony when they use “verbal” to mean “oral” so that the record was as clear as possible.

Nevertheless, prevalent everyday usage seems to have erased this distinction, reducing it to the kind of technicality that those of us who consider ourselves rhetorical pragmatists (if not outright prescriptivists) no longer bother with.  I can’t quite shake the feeling, however, that this is a barricade worth maintaining. 

Addendum: My fellow legal writing profs fall into three camps: those who think I need to get a life, those who think I'm wrong, and those who think I'm right.  The first group, of course, is the most right.  The profs in the second point to a common dictionary definition (never the primary one) that equates "verbal" with "oral" and that is attested to by use going back centuries.  More importantly, they pointed out that context will typically show whether the speaker or writer intends "verbal" to mean "oral."  I also suspect they didn't anticipate anyone would ever object to the use of "verbal" for "oral," no doubt because of the same usage I've witnessed.  One prof even suggested people are reluctant to use the word "oral" because of its association with sex.  

I'm not going to be a stickler on the point any longer, but I still would recommend using "oral" when one intends "spoken."  "Verbal" is ambiguous -- the primary definition is "in words."  "Oral" is not mistakable.  And while context may usually reveal the user's intent, I'd prefer the reader not have to resort to context.  I want the reader to know what I mean with as little mental hesitation as possible.  Even if the reader has to hesitate for just a moment and remind himself that this is a writer who in referring to a "verbal contract" means one that is in words but not written, that is a hesitation that is counter to the writer's objectives.  Moreover, there is an audience out there (myself included), who will hesitate over verbal.

Addendum: My latest, and last post on the topic, to my fellow legal writing profs: I am not trying to be a pedant, and the matter is not worth any more of our time, but just so you know, Garner’s Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage agrees emphatically with me that spoken words are “oral,” not “verbal.”  I guess my bottom line is: if you can choose an unambiguous term over an ambiguous term, why not use the former?

Addendum: Alan Greenspan explains why we're in Iraq: "I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil."

When I asked in another place what we're trying to accomplish I basically get this message: we're establishing a viable democracy, and it will happen, but it will take a long, long time -- 10 to 40 years.  Of course others find my questions ridiculous, a view which I cannot fathom.  Mostly, though, the questions are simply ignored.

Aside from making the document more reader-friendly, starting each paragraph with a thesis sentence offers a number of benefits to the legal writer as well.  First, by beginning each paragraph with the point of that paragraph, the legal writer forces himself to think more critically about why he is including that paragraph and how specifically that paragraph advances his argument.  As a result, thesis sentences are particularly helpful in paragraphs that describe case law relating to a particular issue.  By forcing himself to draft a thesis sentence for the paragraph, the legal writer is less likely to devote a paragraph to an irrelevant case.

Second, by using thesis sentences, the legal writer now has an easy method of testing the overall organization of his paper.   If each paragraph truly does begin with a sentence that encapsulates the point of that paragraph, the legal writer should be able to skim his paper, looking only at the first sentence of each paragraph, and immediately know if he has remained on topic.  For example, if the legal writer finds a thesis sentence about negligence in a section of the paper dealing with an intentional tort, the legal writer would immediately know that the paragraph may be out of place.  Furthermore, if the legal writer were to find two thesis sentences that essentially say the same thing in different sections of the paper, then perhaps there is an organizational problem that is causing the legal writer to be redundant.

Finally, thesis sentences are particularly beneficial for the legal writer who is seeking to persuade.  Psycholinguists (scientists who study the psychology of language) have discovered that readers subconsciously pay closer attention to things that come at the beginning and end of a document or a discreet unit of a document such as a subsection or even a paragraph within the overall document.  Armed with this knowledge, the persuasive legal writer is well-served to place the most persuasive information in a position where the legal reader is likely to pay greater attention.  The first sentence of a paragraph is such a position; thus, putting a strong statement about the law and how it advances the legal writer’s argument in that position is more likely to receive the notice of the legal reader.

You can try to bridge the generational gap, and it'll probably be easier to if you're close in age. But you can't, and shouldn't bridge the professional (professorial) gap. And some generational gapness is okay. It's okay to be olde school. You're still in school, but you're the professor. So teach your students to be lawyers, and they'll teach you how to stay cool (maybe).

The real lesson of Vietnam for Iraq is clear enough. America lost that war because a succession of changes in South Vietnamese leadership, many of them inspired by Washington, never produced an effective government in Saigon. None of those changes, beginning with the American-sponsored coup that led to the murder of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, changed the underlying reality of a South Vietnamese government and army that never won the loyalty and support of large sections of the Vietnamese population.

The short-term sequels of American withdrawal from Indochina were brutal, as the immediate sequels of America’s withdrawal from Iraq will surely be. But the American people rightly concluded that with no way to win a military victory, there could be no justification for allowing thousands more United States troops to die in Vietnam. Those deaths would not have changed the sequels to the war, just as more American deaths will not change the sequel to the war in Iraq. Once the war in Southeast Asia was over, America’s domestic divisions healed, its battered armed forces were rebuilt and the nation was much better positioned to deal with the relentless challenges of global leadership.

Viewed from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The Carswell case only required the court to determine whether Ohio's new anti-gay marriage amendment nullified the legal protections unmarried victims of domestic abuse currently receive. The court declares there's no conflict between the two legal provisions, giving unmarried, heterosexual women comfort - even a boost. Their legal rights against sex-based violence at men's hands are, happily, secured. But so are the rights of victims of same-sex domestic abuse, including lesbians and gay men. Earlier decisions, undisturbed by Carswell, declared them entitled to the same freedom from domestic violence that unmarried heterosexuals have.

But Carswell doesn't stop there, at least its underlying logic doesn't. Although the court doesn't put it in these words, the basic reason it announces that the domestic violence law isn't afoul of the marriage amendment is that the amendment turns out not to mean what it says.

The amendment's first sentence is plain enough: "Only a union between one man and one woman may be a marriage valid in or recognized by this state and its political subdivisions." This, the court tells us, means no same-sex marriage.

The marriage amendment's second sentence (the part that the domestic violence law was said to violate) gets different treatment. The court expressly looks beyond the text for its meaning.

The sentence reads: "This state and its political subdivisions shall not create or recognize a legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance or effect of marriage." According to the court, this doesn't mean the state is barred from creating or recognizing any nonmarital, intimate relationship with the look, feel or smell of marriage. No matter that that's the most straightforward interpretation of the text and the one Justice Judith Lanzinger "reluctantly and regretfully" adopts in her lone dissent.

What, then, does this provision mean? Carswell ventures: It "means that the state cannot create or recognize a legal status for unmarried persons that bears all of the attributes of marriage - a marriage substitute." The court's only stated example: civil unions. That's what the second sentence of the amendment bans.

So, the marriage amendment, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, now looks like this: The state may not define marriage except as it has traditionally been defined - one man, one woman, as husband and wife. Nor may it "create or recognize" a "marriage substitute" "that bears all of the attributes of marriage."

 
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports:

If U.S. combat forces withdraw from Iraq in the near future, three developments would be likely to unfold. Majority Shiites would drive Sunnis out of ethnically mixed areas west to Anbar province. Southern Iraq would erupt in civil war between Shiite groups. And the Kurdish north would solidify its borders and invite a U.S. troop presence there. In short, Iraq would effectively become three separate nations.

That was the conclusion reached in recent "war games" exercises conducted for the U.S. military by retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson. "I honestly don't think it will be apocalyptic," said Anderson, who has served in Iraq and now works for a major defense contractor. But "it will be ugly."

From a friend who seemed to like my own riffs on Amsterdam and bicycles, comes a pointer to Amsterdam Bicycles, 82 photos of bicycles with accompanying written description.

Step 1: Choose a business

The businesses on our site are always changing. They are being uploaded by our microfinance partners around the world. You can find a new business on the home page or on the Businesses 'In Need' page.

Step 2: Make a loan

When you have selected a business, you can make a loan using your credit card (via PayPal). You can loan as little as $25 at a time. Checking out is easy and safe because of PayPal.

Step 3: Receive journals and payments

Periodically, you will hear back from the business you sponsor. Partner representatives (often loan officers) write directly to the website to keep you informed on the progress of the business. If you choose, you can receive these via email.

Step 4: Withdraw or re-loan

When your Kiva loan is repaid, you can choose to withdraw your funds or re-loan to a new business.

Scratch the surface of the current immigration debate and beneath the posturing lies a dirty secret. Anti-immigrant sentiment is older than America itself. Born before the nation, this abiding fear of the “huddled masses” emerged in the early republic and gathered steam into the 19th and 20th centuries, when nativist political parties, exclusionary laws and the Ku Klux Klan swept the land.

As we celebrate another Fourth of July, this picture of American intolerance clashes sharply with tidy schoolbook images of the great melting pot. Why has the land of “all men are created equal” forged countless ghettoes and intricate networks of social exclusion? Why the signs reading “No Irish Need Apply”? And why has each new generation of immigrants had to face down a rich glossary of now unmentionable epithets? Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching.

That fence along the Mexican border now being contemplated by Congress is just the latest vestige of a venerable tradition, at least as old as John Jay’s “wall of brass.” “Don’t fence me in” might be America’s unofficial anthem of unfettered freedom, but too often the subtext is, “Fence everyone else out.”

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

Roberts’ kids go to Episcopal Day School in suburban Maryland.  Roberts was a partner in Hogan & Hartson, and his wife was a partner in Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.  How integrated do you suppose any of those institutions are?

According to Orfield, G. (2001), “Schools more separate: Consequences of a decade of resegregation”:

"[P]opulation trends indicate that current white students will live in an increasingly diverse society. They can expect to work and live in an increasingly non-white America. However, because white students are learning in schools that are becoming more and more white, we cannot expect that their educational experience will prepare them for this future. According to Orfield, white students are having less and less exposure to black and Latino students in public schools.

"What percentage of white students are exposed to black or Latino students? In other words, what percentage of white students attend schools also attended by blacks or Latinos?

"[The data shows] a disturbing trend. White students are increasingly educated in segregated settings. For instance, even though the Latino population is the fastest growing segment of the U.S. community,fewer than30% of white students attend school with Latino students.

"Orfield does not believe that the current situation in U.S. public schools is adequately preparing students to live in an increasingly diverse society. School segregation not only has dramatic costs for minority students educated in inferior schools, but, Orfield argues, it will have a negative impact on white students' abilities to interact with minority Americans in their future workplaces."

As a high school student, I find one aspect of the recent Supreme Court ruling on the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” case very unsettling. In writing his judicial opinion on the case, Justice Clarence Thomas said, “In light of the history of American public education, it cannot seriously be suggested that the First Amendment ‘freedom of speech’ encompasses a student’s right to speak in public schools.”

This is a dangerous assertion, that students have no freedom of speech whatsoever in the public school system. Children have as much of a right to state their opinions as do adults.

Using Justice Thomas’s logic, a partisan teacher could punish a student for displaying a differing political opinion, and there would be no breach of the law.

If you listen to music, news or other programming via the Internet, you're likely to find a soundstream of silence today. The Day of Silence is a one-day protest being staged by big corporate web radio outlets, innovative smaller companies that are trying to invent a new kind of showcase for recorded music, and individuals who've been flexing their creative muscles by starting up their own web radio stations.

The idea is to focus attention on a startlingly sharp increase--in many cases, more than double the current rates-- in the royalty payments that the Librarian of Congress and the Copyright Royalty Board have decided web radio stations must pay to artists and record labels for the right to play their tunes. . . .

Why should you care? In many cases, the new royalty rates will exceed the total annual revenue of the web stations. That means, obviously, that those stations would cease to exist when the new rates kick in on July 15. And pandora.com, which creates a unique radio station for every one of its many thousands of visitors (the service uses a recommendation engine to select music based on your existing preferences), would face the prospect of having to pay separate royalties for each of its customers--an immediate death knell. All protest-related hype aside, thousands of web stations would vanish virtually overnight.

Why is the government doing this? Largely because the recording industry wants to stuff the genie back in the bottle and roll back the extraordinary blossoming of music programming available on the web. But the record industry isn't the only player here. The broadcast radio industry is clinging to its structural advantage over webradio: AM and FM radio stations must pay only one form of royalties--to composers of a given song--while webcasters must pay that royalty and an additional one to the performers of the tune.

Holland also exhibits the greatest tolerance of homosexuality I have ever encountered.

Public order does not seem to have suffered.  In fact, the public order is remarkable.

I'm not sure what we're so afraid of in this country.  Clarence Thomas, though -- concurring in the judgment in the "Bongs Hits for Jesus" case -- indulges his "originalism" by looking back fondly on an educational system in which teachers taught, and students listened.  There's no chance a student in such a class might argue that the Dutch approach to drugs and prostitution might make more sense.  I'm not sure I know a more ineffective educational method. How Clarence Thomas can rely on 18th century educational methods to justify an interpretation of the First Amendment's application to contemporary schools is beyond me:

In short, in the earliest public schools, teachers taught, and students listened. Teachers commanded, and students obeyed. Teachers did not rely solely on the power ofideas to persuade; they relied on discipline to maintain order. Morse v. Frederick, No. 06-278 (U.S. June 25, 2007)(Thomas, concurring).

The soldier had taken a bullet in his temple from a sniper, and the Cleveland Indians who visited him early Saturday were so taken by his story that they vowed to try to get him a victory.

When the Indians finally delivered — in an improbable ninth inning that included a homer to straightaway center field and an unusual double play — they remembered the wounded private as they celebrated the win.

As with most teams who have road trips to the nation's capital, the Indians visited wounded servicemen at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital. Martinez and starter Paul Byrd were particularly touched by the soldier who had taken the bullet in the head and lived to tell about it.

"He was in good spirits and we said: 'We'll try and win one for you tonight,'" Byrd said. "And he said: 'Don't worry, it's a done deal. You've just shaken the hand of a lucky, lucky man. I got shot in the head and I lived.' I didn't know whether to go over there and rub him and get some of that or what, but we shook his hand."

From this week's Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Amsterdam, Netherlands- "I thought it was right here."

Mireille has that I'm-worried- but-I'm-not-going-to-panic-yet look on her face. It's 5:40 p.m., the top of the afternoon rush hour, and she has been searching for only two minutes.

She has lost her bicycle in the Amsterdam Central train station's high-rise bike lot, where 2,500 two-wheelers are crammed pedal-to-pedal, handlebar-to- handlebar on five soaring levels.

                                            Central Station, Amsterdam

I recently returned from teaching U.S. contract law to a group of LLM students at the Amsterdam Law School of the Universiteit Van Amsterdam.  The experience was exhilerating in all respects.  The administration treated me magnificently, the students were first-rate and highly motivated, and living and working in Amsterdam for a few weeks was a far greater pleasure than I had even anticipated.  I knew Amsterdamers loved to ride bicycles, but I had no idea that, it seems, everyone rides bicycles.  Here was mine, a loan from a student who'd received it from RaboBank as a gift for opening a checking account:

I had to stand up on the coaster brakes if I had any hope of coming to a relatively quick stop, and I was about a half-foot too tall for the frame, but I fit right in.  It's exactly the kind of bicycle Amsterdamers ride, commuting to work, going out shopping, hitting the club scene, or going wherever else they are going in their relatively compact, flat city filled with bike paths and lanes (and trams and cars and pedestrians).  I'll write more in the coming days about what I taught and about my attendance at the conference sponsored by the Society for European Contract Law (SECOLA) on The Common Frame of Reference and the Future of European Contract Law.

In the meantime, I'm back in Cleveland and inspired to ride my bicycle as I haven't since high school and college.  It's wonderful to be home, but I've found I could live in Amsterdam.  The culture, the history, the diversity, and the manageability of its version of urban life suited me well. 

Here are my students.  I miss them already:

Why a black swan? Taleb's starting point is what philosophers call the problem of induction. Suppose you have spent all your life in the northern hemisphere and have only ever seen white swans. You might very well conclude (inductively) that all swans are white. But take a trip to Australia, where swans are black, and your theory will collapse. A "Black Swan" is therefore anything that seems to us, on the basis of our limited experience, to be impossible.

The common law accounts for the dangers in inductive reasoning by limiting judicial power to the resolution of the particular case between the particular parties before the court.  Courts are always, of course, seeking to articulate generalizations from their own and other courts’ decided cases, but those generalizations are always subject to reevaluation under new sets of facts. 

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.” 

Britney Spears cutting her hair off is the least-worthy front page news story in the history of humanity.

Apparently, from now on, every time a jackass sticks a pencil in his own eye, we'll have to wait an extra ten minutes to hear what happened on the battlefield or in Congress or any other place that actually matters.

On the same day that Britney was shaving her head, a guy I know who works in the office of Senator Bernie Sanders sent me an email. He was trying very hard to get news organizations interested in some research his office had done about George Bush's proposed 2008 budget, which was unveiled two weeks ago and received relatively little press, mainly because of the controversy over the Iraq war resolution. All the same, the Bush budget is an amazing document. It would be hard to imagine a document that more clearly articulates the priorities of our current political elite.

Not only does it make many of Bush's tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what's interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders's office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family -- the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune -- would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Addendum: Raymond Ward, the New Orleans lawyer -- my students' most immediate concern for him should be his blog the (new) legal writer, but they, and everyone else, should also read his blog Minor Wisdom -- read the article I quoted above by Matt Taibi and paired it with a quotation from Awareness, by Anthony de Mello: “Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up.”

I have to admit to something I don't know whether I can actually say here: I absolutely hated those two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center. They were a typical kind of architecture that has no ideas behind it. Moreover, they disrupted the skyline of the city; they towered absurdly over the beautiful crystalline topography of Manhattan. They were two monuments to the cult of profit at any cost: regardless of what they looked like, they had to have the greatest imaginable number of square meters of office space.

Thinking clearly sometimes requires unbraiding our language. The word “copyright” may eventually seem as dubious in its embedded purposes as “family values,” “globalization,” and, sure, “intellectual property.” Copyright is a “right” in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results. So let's try calling it that—not a right but a monopoly on use, a “usemonopoly”—and then consider how the rapacious expansion of monopoly rights has always been counter to the public interest, no matter if it is Andrew Carnegie controlling the price of steel or Walt Disney managing the fate of his mouse. Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation's shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.

* * *

Artists and their surrogates who fall into the trap of seeking recompense for every possible second use end up attacking their own best audience members for the crime of exalting and enshrining their work. The Recording Industry Association of America prosecuting their own record-buying public makes as little sense as the novelists who bristle at autographing used copies of their books for collectors. And artists, or their heirs, who fall into the trap of attacking the collagists and satirists and digital samplers of their work are attacking the next generation of creators for the crime of being influenced, for the crime of responding with the same mixture of intoxication, resentment, lust, and glee that characterizes all artistic successors. By doing so they make the world smaller, betraying what seems to me the primary motivation for participating in the world of culture in the first place: to make the world larger.

* * *

We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership, to the detriment of the public good. We have to remain constantly vigilant to prevent raids by those who would selfishly exploit our common heritage for their private gain. Such raids on our natural resources are not examples of enterprise and initiative. They are attempts to take from all the people just for the benefit of a few.

The mature and reasonably well educated adult who cannot understand expository writing should not conclude that he is dull-witted or that the subject is too abstruse for him. He should at least entertain the suspicion that the fault lies with the author and that the writing is bad.

Lester S. King, Why Not Say It Clearly 19 (1978).

"It is not just that many judges write badly. Cases are selected for (law school) casebooks not because they are examples of good writing, or even clarity, but because they illustrate the precepts of law in that course. Even when edited, many of these cases are wordy, redundant and confusing. The inadvertent consequence of reading all this lawspeak and generally bad writing is that it causes the student to internalize it. We think that if judges write this way, then it is the language of the profession -- something to be emulated."

 "I don't think they spend a great deal of time with what somebody like a Cicero might refer to as rhetoric, or the idea of taking their understanding of ideas and being able to communicate them in a particular way," Roberts said, adding that the ability to advocate or negotiate is "such a big part of what lawyers do no matter where you go."

If he were dean of a law school, Roberts said, looking at Northwestern Dean David E. Van Zandt, he might spend more time on that.

Perhaps even more fundamental is Posner's reminder that, strictly speaking, in modern law there is no such thing as a legal claim for plagiarism. Copying might be actionable as copyright infringement or breach of contract, and it might lead to dismissal for a student who buys a canned term paper or a professor who puts his name on a student's work, but "the most common punishments for plagiarism outside the school setting have nothing to do with law. They are disgrace, humiliation, ostracism, and other shaming penalties imposed by public opinion on people who violate social norms whether or not they are also legal norms."

Such distinctions, however, are ultimately less interesting to Posner than the notion that the current obsession with plagiarism stands at the precise intersection of the cult of celebrity and what he calls "the cult of originality." Indeed, he complains about "the absurd idea that 'copying' is inherently bad" and the "growing belief that literary, artistic, and other intellectual goods are not really 'creative' unless they are 'original.' " Although he never condones the kind of unacknowledged quoting or paraphrasing that got Viswanathan and Kearns Goodwin in trouble, he suggests that copying the works of other authors is an old and honorable tradition.

Thus, for example, Posner points out that T.S. Eliot's masterpiece "The Waste Land" is "a tissue of quotations (without quotation marks)," a fact that Eliot himself seems to have acknowledged when he elsewhere observed: "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different." To illustrate Eliot's point, Posner traces a memorable passage from "The Waste Land" ("The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne ... ") to Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra." He reminds us that Shakespeare borrowed and adapted this description from Sir Thomas North's translation of the work of Plutarch.

"If this is plagiarism," cracks Posner, "we need more plagiarism."

We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we're for them and trying to get them out of there. Hit the streets to protest Bush's proposed surge. If you can, go to the peace march in Washington on Jan. 27. We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, "Stop it, now!"

As this Court knows, the New Orleans Saints will play in the [NFC] Championship game — the first such game in the franchise's forty-year history — against the Chicago Bears in Chicago, Illinois on January 21, 2007 at 2:30 p.m. In order to accommodate all fans, including the great majority of the jury pool, the parties involved in this case, and counsel involved in this case, and in order to ensure that a full jury pool appears on the first day of trial, Defendants request that the beginning of trial be pushed back two days to January 24, 2007....

Addendum: Ernie the Attorney, another New Orleans lawyer (like Minor Wisdom), first thought the motion was unprofessional but was subsequently convinced of its merit.  But, of course, the Saints lost, so I wonder exactly what it's like down in the N.O. courthouses today . . .

A Pentagon official who criticized large U.S. law firms for representing terrorism suspects at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has apologized for his comments, saying that his discussion on a local radio program does not reflect his "core beliefs."

Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said yesterday that he regrets what he told Federal News Radio on Thursday, when he suggested that chief executives of U.S. companies should question being represented by lawyers who do pro bono work for terrorism suspects.

Concealing the actor’s identity is not a good reason to use the passive voice unless the actor really is unimportant to the point being made.  Jon Stewart shows exactly why.  The best way to make Hacker’s point concisely is Hacker’s earlier expression of the rule governing the use of the passive voice:

The rule that writers should “prefer” active verbs means just that: Use the active voice unless you have a good reason for choosing the passive.

The bulk of the Article analyzes the copyright and fair use implications of lawsuits challenging Google Book Search, filed by several publishers and a putative class of up to 8,000 published authors. I contend that reproducing excerpts from scanned books for the purpose of improving access to information about books on the internet, Google is making a transformative use of the books that should qualify as a fair use. Courts have recognized that copyright owners are not entitled to gain a monopoly over the market for information about their works, or to suppress efforts to improve the public's access to information and high-quality research tools. Google Book Search is distinguishable from prior attempts to disseminate complete copies of protected works, from newspaper articles in the Free Republic case to songs in the Napster and MP3.com cases. Insofar as most works being scanned by Google have already been published, and are nonfictional and fact-based, these facts also strongly support Google's fair use arguments.

Most importantly, the evidence so far is that Google Book Search will dramatically improve, rather than detract from, the sales of books that it permits users to find, preview, and purchase. Google Book Search has tripled the sales of many books, and other online previews of books have also markedly increased sales. Total book sales are up substantially in the period after Google began scanning copyrighted books, indicating a fair use under the Sony Betamax case and other precedents.

There's probably not much that President Bush can say or do to convince world public opinion - and most Democrats - that he's not a "reckless" foreign policy "cowboy" or "arrogant bully."

He's just going to have to win the Iraq war in short order and with minimal casualties, hope that Iraqis dance in the streets and then start swiftly building democracy in the Middle East.

That's what I think, and it's also more or less the attitude of the White House's chief of global communications, Tucker Eskew, who told me in an interview, "This isn't a popularity contest. It's a test of leadership."

"You have to bring people around by getting results," he said. "You have to be consistent with your message, so when you do get results people can put it into a framework."

By "results," Eskew says he means "disarming Saddam Hussein and promoting liberty in an area of the world that's known precious little of it."

* * *

In the end, though, what counts is whether the United States wins a clean victory in Iraq and uncovers a vast cache of illegal weapons and then sets up a stable government.

We should know whether Bush is a hero or a goat in about six months. Then, of course, he has to handle North Korea and work on peace in the Mideast.

"This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists, an authority president Bush then used to empower the Secretary of the Treasury to impose guilt by association," said David Cole of the Washington-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

"The court's decision confirms that even in fighting terror, unchecked executive authority and trampling on fundamental freedoms is not a permissible option," he said in a statement.

 Let me be clear here today: Our law plainly and unequivocally prohibits torture as well as cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The United States does not engage in torture, and consistent with our law and practice, no evidence obtained by torture shall be admitted at a military commission proceeding.

Torture is not tolerated by this country on the battlefield or off. Anyone who tortures or abuses a detainee tarnishes the service of every honorable student and soldier in this room today. The President has said this, and I will say it again: those who commit torture in the name of the United States government will be prosecuted.

Addendum: Hat's off to the Buckeyes.  May they face the Wolverines again in the BCS Championship game.

1. Terrorism is anything but new.

2. Terrorism is obviously a threat, and the deliberate killing of innocent civilians an outrage, but it is not a very big threat.

3. The danger from terrorist use of so-called weapons of mass destruction is not as large as scaremongers profess. Known chemical weapons do not, in fact, cause much wider damage than conventional weapons, and in addition they are difficult to use.

4. Many terrorists are not madmen. The choice to use terror can be quite rational and calculated.

5. Groups that commit terrorism, in many cases, believe they are acting defensively, using the most effective means at their disposal. Their justifications can be self-serving and morally repugnant, but are often carefully elaborated. Some terrorists rely on the complicity of the people around them, and so must work to persuade them of their rectitude. Others operate in inhospitable environments, and aim more to shock and provoke. It is, Richardson emphasizes, important to distinguish these differing approaches, since they suggest different remedies.

6. Suicide attacks can also represent a rational policy choice. They are cheap. They can be a means of access to difficult targets. They are effective in frightening people, and in advertising the seriousness and devotion of those who undertake them. . . .  Suicide attacks are not new, either.

7. There is no special link between Islam and terrorism. Most major religions have produced some form of terrorism, and many terrorist groups have professed atheism.

8. Electoral democracy does not prevent terrorism, which has flourished in many democracies, typically being used by groups representing minorities who believe the logic of majority rule excludes them.

9. Democratic principles are no impediment to prosecuting terrorists. On the contrary they are, Richardson asserts, "among the strongest weapons in our arsenal."

10. Military action is sometimes necessary to combat terrorism, but it is often not the best way to do so.

11. Armies, in fact, often create more problems than they solve.

12. To address the issues terrorists say they are fighting for cannot automatically be dismissed as appeasement.

The University of Alabama is suing Daniel A. Moore, a "sports artist" who for 25 years has painted scenes of the University of Alabama's football team, seeking to enjoin him from using images and colors that violate the university's trademarks, including its "famous crimson and white color scheme. "'This lawsuit is the equivalent of the Catholic Church suing Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel,' said Keith Dunnavant, an Alabama alumnus and the author of 'Coach: The Life of Paul "Bear" Bryant.'" The lawyer for the artist argued to the court that a trademark owner "does not have the right to control public discourse [if] the public imbues his mark with a meaning," and asked, "Who could argue with a straight face that the cultural significance of Alabama football has not assumed such a role.?"  I couldn't argue with him, but if Alabama football has assumed such a role, what about Michigan vs. Ohio State?

Virtually every U.S. law student knows of the crucial question, "What is chicken?"  Now a judge asks, "What is a sandwich?"  Or at least, "Is a burrito a sandwich?"  The answer is no:

Worcester Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Locke ruled that an exclusivity clause in Panera's lease restricting the White City Shopping Center from renting to another sandwich shop doesn't prohibit the mall from adding a Qdoba Mexican Grill.

Locke cited Webster's Dictionary as well as testimony from a chef and a former high-ranking federal agriculture official in ruling that Qdoba's burritos and other offerings shouldn't be considered sandwiches, The Boston Globe reported Friday.

The difference, the judge ruled, comes down to two slices of bread versus one tortilla.

"A sandwich is not commonly understood to include burritos, tacos, and quesadillas, which are typicallyrel made with a single tortilla and stuffed with a choice filling of meat, rice, and beans," Locke wrote in a decision eased last week.

"We in America do not have government by the majority.  We have government by the majority who participate." -- Thomas Jefferson

The school should be referred to as “Case Reserve” (either for all purposes or in all but official contexts). “Case Reserve” reflects the school’s real, dual heritage and its real, hybrid present. It honors the alums of both schools from the years before the merger. The frustration is real on the part of Reserve grads who feel their school has been airbrushed out of existence. My dad is one such alum (Reserve ’46) who continues to feel offense at the “Case” (not Reserve) brand, and though his feelings did not affect his giving to his alma mater, I think it reasonable to imagine there are others for whom it would.

Moreover, right now we are a major university for reasons traceable back to both Western Reserve and Case. If some believe the school’s brand should reflect some perceived dominance of the medical and engineering schools, putting Case first should satisfy those feelings. As a member of a faculty with its origins in Western Reserve, I do not make that concession easily.

Leaving “Western” out of the name is simply a concession to the reality that something as seemingly as durable as geography does change.  We no longer are located in the West as we were when Western Reserve was named. I’ve been to conferences and other convocations all over the country and had people glance at my name tag and ask me, “Is that in Arizona or California?” Retaining Reserve, however, reflects the roots the school has in the colonial era as a special “reserve” of Connecticut.

Finally, Case Reserve is memorable. It doesn’t mean anything by itself, so it is quickly identifiable as a name. Yet both its parts are identifiable, evocative words (without, as far as I can tell, any potentially offensive connotations).

And no one would wonder again when Western Reserve went under.

Even better, though, we should name the University after someone who gives it a billion dollars.

WMMT comes to you live, with real people on the other side of the microphone. The people you hear on WMMT are real people, in some cases your neighbors, playing their favorite music, telling a joke or a tall tale every once in a while, sharing their own joys, sorrows and views, often sharing with you live the music, writing and art of Appalachian people. . . .

WMMT’s programming is as diverse as its listenership, but we are particularly proud of our commitment to traditional Appalachian music and its descendant, bluegrass music. But we also have killer rock & roll shows, Americana, Celtic, Kid’s Radio, jazz, blues, big band, gospel, hip-hop, ska, punk, zydeco, Rockin’ and Starvin’ Marvin and a world class trivia show. . . .

At 88.7 (or on the Internet), you’ll hear true community radio, one of only a handful of such stations in the whole country. One moment you may hear a great-grandfather playing his favorite bluegrass tune, another day a teen-ager sharing his love of hip hop, a kid talking about his first fish, local musicians being interviewed and played, people talking about chip mills or who knows what else. . . .

Not quite the drop-everything event for us that it is for some others, but certainly something we look forward to spending much of the next month with. It weighs in at 1085 pages, and around 410,000 words. The opening scene is aboard: "the hydrogen skyship Inconvenience, its gondola draped with patriotic bunting", as some members of the Chums of Chance are on their way to Chicago .....

It's divided into five sections:

1. The Light Over the Ranges
2. Iceland Spar
3. Bilocations
4. Against the Day
5. Rue de départ

The epigraph is from Thelonious Monk.

And the first impression is that the Pynchon book it most resembles is, indeed, Gravity's Rainbow. But that's just a very quick first impression: this is definitely a text it's going to take a while to deal with.

 

It is true that courts consider the amount of the copyrighted material used in determining whether a use of copyrighted materials without permission is “fair use,” but there is no bright line to be drawn simply based on amount.  What matters rather than sheer amount is how much the alleged infringer’s use of the copyrighted material can serve as a substitute for the copyright holder’s potential uses of it.  A small excerpt might constitute the essence of a text, and, if so, a court is far more likely to find use of that small excerpt to be an infringement than use of an entire text that does not give away the essence of that entire text.  How could use of an entire text not give away the entirety of the text?  The library project provides a good example: Google might have to use the entirety of texts to create a database capable of usefully searching those texts, but the user will not have access to the texts (other than the snippets elicited by their search requests) through Google if the copyright holder denies Google the permission to provide full access.  Perhaps such snippets could give away the essence of some books (and for this reason I believe Google has left dictionaries out of its library project), but I cannot imagine that the number of such works would be more than a small portion of all the works Google plans to digitize.   

Of course, courts consider factors other than the amount of appropriated text in making their fair use determinations, and those other factors are far more important than the amount.  Most importantly (but of course, again, not exclusively), courts focus on market impact.  There is almost certainly copyright infringement if a challenged use of copyrighted work adversely affects the sales by the copyright holder of the copyrighted work.  Obviously, the more the appropriated text can serve as a substitute for the entirety of the copyrighted work the more likely it is to cause the copyright holder to lose sales. 

How we deal with crises is what defines us. We are defined as a country in times like this. Do you know who defended the British in the Boston Massacre? John Adams, who later became president. Firing into a crowd in Boston and killing five people was a pretty significant act. Eight British soldiers and their commanding officer were put on trial, but they couldn’t get anyone to defend them. Finally Adams agreed to do it. All but two were acquitted, and the others …received a branding on the thumb. Adams later called his defending them the greatest service he’ done for his country. He said that to convict those people under these conditions would have been as grave a stain on our reputation as the witchcraft trials of Salem.

. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

 But those days are over. America’s moral standing has eroded, thanks to its flawed rationale for war and scandals like Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and Haditha. The last thing we can afford now is to leave Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions open to reinterpretation, as President Bush proposed to do and can still do under the compromise bill that emerged last week.

Blurring the lines on the letter of Article 3 — it governs the treatment of prisoners of war, prohibiting “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture” and “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment” — will only make our troops’ tough fight even tougher. It will undermine the power of all the Geneva Conventions, immediately endanger American troops captured by the enemy and create a powerful recruiting tool for Al Qaeda.

How does it feel knowing that your government will pass laws permitting the violation of the Geneva Conventions against torture? How does it feel knowing the taxes you pay from money you earned are going towards the salary of legally sanctioned torturers? How does it feel knowing that the only political party with an organization large enough to stand in opposition to [those] in charge of this country's legislature and executive were actually boasting that they were not going to get involved in one of the most important moral debates of our time?  And how does it feel to have George W. Bush, that paragon of moral probity, mental stability, and well-informed intelligence, granted the legal right to determine what is and isn't torture?

I began writing a post in response to this truly ridiculous Op-Ed by John Yoo in this morning's NYT -- in which Yoo gleefully celebrates every authoritarian transgression of the Bush administration, from torture and pre-emptive wars to endless invocations of presidential secrecy, the issuance of "hundreds of signing statements" declaring laws invalid, and even what Yoo calls the President's assertion of his power to "sidestep laws that invade his executive authority" (what we used to call "breaking the law") (emphasis added in all instances).

But then I thought better of it, because, at this point, anyone who fails (or refuses) to recognize that the President does not have the power in our system of government to violate laws by invoking national security concerns is never going to recognize that. Yoo's Op-Ed is so flagrantly frivolous that it ought not be taken seriously. He even goes so far as to claim that the "founders intended that wrongheaded or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be checked by presidential action." How can you be on the faculty of a major law school and say this? . . .

Why is it even necessary to point out that the U.S. President does not have the power to violate laws which he thinks are "wrongheaded or obsolete," or that Presidents have no authority to disregard "wrongheaded or obsolete judicial decisions" (whatever that might mean)? And what permits a "law professor" to claim otherwise on the Op-Ed page of the NYT? Under this administration, there is no notion too radical or authoritarian to be off limits not only from being subject to debate, but from being implemented.

Just look at the things we're debating -- whether the U.S. Government can abduct and indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens without charges; whether we can use torture to interrogate people; whether our Government can eavesdrop on our private conversations without warrants; whether we can create secret prisons and keep people there out of sight and beyond the reach of any law or oversight; and whether the President can simply disregard long-standing constitutional limitations and duly enacted Congressional laws because he has deemed that doing so is necessary to "protect" us.

These haven't been open questions for decades if not centuries. They've been settled as intrinsic values that define our country. Yet nothing is settled or resolved any longer. Everything -- even the most extremist and authoritarian policies and things which were long considered taboo -- are now openly entertained, justifiable and routinely justified.

I caught [Bush] on the tube today, explaining to the assembled White House press . . .  why the Geneva Convention's Common Article 3 is "vague" and "open to interpretation." By which he meant: "It lets us waterboard anybody we like."

The fact that we have over 50 years of law and precedent based on Article 3, that the U.S. military has issued (and now re-issued) an entire field manual interpreting it, that the U.S. Code contains a specific statute to enforce it -- these apparently haven't resolved those pesky ambiguities that have created so many PR problems for the Children of Light in their eternal war against the Children of Darkness.

But, as Marty Lederman asks over at Balkinization, if Article 3 is so "vague," and our organs of state security never use torture (as President Cheney and his underlings tell us repeatedly) then why are the administration's mouthpieces fighting so hard to get Congress to bar the courts from reviewing methods such as hypothermia, near drowning, standing in place with hands shackled over head for 40 hours or more, etc.? And why are the Rovian clone clowns on Capitol Hill trying to amend the War Crimes Act? And why are CIA operatives suddenly taking out "torture insurance" (including the accidental death or dismemberment riders)?

The answers are pretty obvious: They're all exposed. Their great big flabby asses are hanging out in the legal breeze, and they know it. They actually are scared it could come to this.

We are, in a sense, at the moment of truth. The sadistic and/or bizarre acts committed in Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib and the CIA's secret prisons can be written off as the crimes of a few bad apples with names like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld -- or, more charitably, as the consequences of a string of bad and brutal decisions made under emergency conditions by men who were terrified by all the things they didn't know about Al Qaeda. Either way, they were not acts of national policy, endorsed and approved by Congress after open, public debate. But, thanks to the Hamdan decision, the question is now formally on the table:

Does Congress really want to make the United States the first nation on earth to specifically provide domestic legal sanction for what would properly and universally be seen as a transparent breach of the minimum, baseline standards for civilized treatment of prisoners established by Common Article 3 -- thereby dealing a grevious blow to the prospect of international adherence to the Geneva Conventions in the future?

President Bush rarely visits Congress. So it was a measure of his painfully skewed priorities that Mr. Bush made the unaccustomed trip yesterday to seek legislative permission for the CIA to make people disappear into secret prisons and have information extracted from them by means he dare not describe publicly.

Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation. But the administration no longer conceals what it wants. It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won't have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and "waterboarding," or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there . . . .

The Bush administration’s proposal to bring leading terrorism suspects before military tribunals met stiff resistance Thursday from key Republicans and top military lawyers who said some provisions would not withstand legal scrutiny or do enough to repair the nation’s tarnished reputation internationally. . . .

Brig, Gen. James C. Walker, the top uniformed lawyer for the Marines, said that no civilized country should deny a defendant the right to see the evidence against him and that the United States “should not be the first.”

Maj. Gen. Scott C. Black, the judge advocate general of the Army, made the same point, and Rear Adm. Bruce E. MacDonald, the judge advocate general of the Navy, said military law provided rules for using classified evidence, whereby a judge could prepare an unclassified version of the evidence to share with the jury and the accused and his lawyer.

Senate Republicans said the proposal to deny the accused the right to see classified evidence was one of the main points of contention remaining between them and the administration.

“It would be unacceptable, legally, in my opinion, to give someone the death penalty in a trial where they never heard the evidence against them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has played a key role in the drafting of alternative legislation as a member of the Armed Services Committee and a military judge. '''Trust us, you’re guilty, we’re going to execute you, but we can’t tell you why'? That’s not going to pass muster; that’s not necessary.”

"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices," Kimmons said. "I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the past five years, hard years, tells us that." He argued that "any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress through the use of abusive techniques would be of questionable credibility." And Kimmons conceded that bad P.R. about abuse could work against the United States in the war on terror. "It would do more harm than good when it inevitably became known that abusive practices were used," Kimmons said. "We can't afford to go there."

Kimmons added that "our most significant successes on the battlefield -- in fact, I would say all of them, almost categorically, all of them" -- came from interrogators that stuck to the kinds of humane techniques framed in the new Army manual. "We don't need abusive practices in there," Kimmons said. "Nothing good will come from them."

[Labor Day] wasn't a national holiday until 1894, and only then because a president was fighting for his political life in the wake of a disastrous railroad strike. Its epicenter was the then-company town of Pullman, Ill., headquarters of the Pullman Palace Car Co., which made railroad sleeping cars. Squeezed between pay cuts and high rents for their company-owned homes, Pullman workers went on strike. Rail workers nationwide joined the protest.  President Grover Cleveland called out 12,000 troops to break the strike, and things got messy in Kensington, Ill., where U.S. marshals killed two protesters.  The American working class was livid. This did not bode well for the midterm elections of that year, and Congress hastily slapped together legislation marking the first Monday in September as Labor Day.  Cleveland signed the bill, hoping to save his hide. Didn't work. Cleveland's Democrats were crushed in the congressional elections that fall.

[A]though an attempt to protect the company's trademark, the letters have raised snickers after they were leaked on to the web. Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

James Glassman and [Tech Central Station] have given birth to something quite new in Washington: journo-lobbying. It's an innovation driven primarily by the influence industry. Lobbying firms that once specialized in gaining person-to-person access to key decision-makers have branched out. The new game is to dominate the entire intellectual environment in which officials make policy decisions, which means funding everything from think tanks to issue ads to phony grassroots pressure groups. But the institution that most affects the intellectual atmosphere in Washington, the media, has also proven the hardest for K Street to influence--until now.

The primary challenge to Joe Lieberman was never fueled exclusively, or even primarily, by his support for the Iraq war. That proposition is conclusively proved by the fact that numerous other Senate and House Democrats who voted for the war are not facing similar challenges. The vigor and intensity of the opposition to Lieberman stem not merely from the fact that he shared the president's positions on Iraq and foreign policy generally, but far worse, that he adopted the Bush/Rove political rhetoric on those issues and -- alone among prominent Democrats -- repeatedly wielded that rhetoric as a tool to bash and demonize anyone who opposed Bush's policies.

Lieberman provided a stark reminder of that point Monday night when he made a last-ditch effort to persuade Connecticut voters to allow him to keep his Senate seat:

He said a victory for Lamont will send a message to the country: "In the Democratic Party, there's no room for strong-on-security Dems." He said that would be disastrous for the Democrats. "You can't win in this country," he said, "unless you assure people" that you aren't going to compromise on national security. He said he has backed the war on terror because he never forgets about the "radical Islamic terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and want to do it again."

As he has done so many times before, Lieberman suggested that anyone who disagrees with him on Iraq -- which happens to be the vast majority of the Democratic Party, as well as the country -- is not a "strong-on-security" Democrat, and that Lamont supporters and those like them want "to compromise on national security."

That is exactly the demonization scheme Karl Rove has exploited to help win two straight national elections and will undoubtedly try this year for a third. By this "reasoning," opponents of the war in Iraq and other Bush policies criticize those policies not because they consider them counterproductive and misguided, but because they are "weak" on defense and want to "compromise national security."

More than anything, that is what accounts for the strong hostility toward Joe Lieberman -- he not only supports Bush's policies on the most critical issues of the day but echoes Bush's most virulent political attacks on Democrats. And he's been doing that for several years now.

Saber interviewed embassy and military people, and traveled in an armored SUV to dangerous zones in Baghdad.

"You are in a military convoy," Saber said. It's like a presidential motorcade, "only you were the guy in the limousine they're protecting."

He saw desolate parts, as well as commerce and people leading normal lives. He visited a pediatric hospital that is being rebuilt with American aid. He saw the courage of American and coalition soldiers who go into unsafe areas to work.

Saber said about 70 percent of Baghdad is still in turmoil from violence between Sunni and Shiite factions. "I can interpret it as nothing else but a civil war," he said, noting that some areas are safe.

And from the London Times,  "Baghdad starts to collapse as its people flee a life of death":

A senior nurse at Yarmouk hospital on the fringes of west Baghdad’s war zone said that he was close to being overwhelmed. “On Tuesday we received 35 bodies in one day, 16 from Al-Furat district alone. All of them were killed execution-style,” he said. “I thought it was the end of the city. I packed my bags at once and got ready to leave because they could storm the hospital at any moment.”

Of course, blunders are the very essence of war, which is why the culture of war is so far removed from the culture of predictability and rationality. Soldiers know that mistakes are the essence of war, because they know what is likely to happen when you arm a lot of frightened boys with deadly weapons. But the public must not be told, lest their simple faith in military authority and rationality be shaken.

The situation in the Middle East is exactly why I've said over and over that I do not support victims of bullying retaliating with violence. People roll their eyes and turn their heads and slap their thighs when I say that if leaders, role models, adults in any position of authority, fail to say no to the use of violence except in the absolute, most dire last resorts scenarios, then it becomes a tool de rigeur and acceptable. Just yesterday on The World, the hosts and guests were talking about this acceptability.

Wrong. We do not have to accept it, and, I know many people disagree with me, but people should be ashamed for promoting the use of violence. It is never a good thing, and someone always, always, always loses, either directly or indirectly, immediately or ultimately.

 Nothing's a Gift
-translated by Walter Whipple

Rear Admiral Donald Guter, who was the Navy’s chief JAG until June, 2002, said that he and the other JAGs, who were experts in the laws of war, tried unsuccessfully to amend parts of the military-commission plan when they learned of it, days before the order was formally signed by the President. “But we were marginalized,” he said. “We were warning them that we had this long tradition of military justice, and we didn’t want to tarnish it. The treatment of detainees was a huge issue. They didn’t want to hear it.” In a 2004 report in the Times, Guter said that when he and the other JAGs told Haynes that they needed more information, Haynes replied, “No, you don’t.” (Haynes’s office offered no comment.)

The bill, dubbed the "worst data bill ever" by Public Interest Research Group's Ed Mierzwinski, would preempt existing state laws that allow consumers to "freeze" their credit and prevent accounts from being opened in their name without permission.

The bill also preempts states from exerting any authority to investigate data breaches, and would only mandate companies notify customers of a data breach or fraud alert after they have performed a "reasonable" investigation themselves.

InfoWorld columnist Ed Foster said that the weakness of H.R. 3997 was due to the effects of heavy lobbying by banks, credit bureaus, and other members of the financial industry on Congress. "So we're talking about a lot of big companies with a lot of influence -- i.e., money -- that they can spread around our nation's capital."

As you can see, Burke is prime lakefront property.  If it were developed as a mixed use--residential, retail, and recreational--neighborhood, it would be an outstanding addition to Cleveland.  Could you imagine lakefront recreation and a vibrant neighborhood right downtown?  My god, Cleveland might begin to resemble Chicago!

Moreover, Burke is pointless.  As small as it is, it can only service small planes, and Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, Cleveland's real airport, is just a 20 minute drive and 30 minute rapid transit ride away from downtown. 

So I've always wondered: why doesn't the city redevelop Burke?  The answer I've always been given is that the corporate CEO's in Cleveland won't let it happen because they so enjoy the luxury of flying their private corporate jets right into downtown, saving themselves the extra half hour or so it would require to be driven in from Hopkins.  (I'm certain they wouldn't avail themselves of the public rail link.)  Cleveland still is, remarkably enough, a major center of corporate headquarters.

In short, the greater public good is hindered by a few fat cats.  Isn't that too often the story?  Well, now comes word from the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has instructed his aides to study development of the unused land surrounding Burke, land that has gone unused because, according to the PD, the "decades-old quandary of how to use the airport has prevented planning and in vestment on land that's not part of Burke's daily operations."  It may be that Jackson is planning on taking on the Oligarchy on this issue, since the article hints the study of the area may include inquiry into use of the entire airport property: "'There has been no decision made on whether Burke will stay or not stay,'" mayoral spokesman Michael House said Wednesday. 'But there are some undeveloped areas around the airport and the mayor wants to look at options for the best uses.'" 

Here's hoping Jackson goes for it all.  I'm not optimistic, however.  When Dennis Kucinich took on the Oligarchy and blocked the sale of the Cleveland's municipal power company, the Oligarchy put the city into default and nearly destroyed his political career.   

Have a wonderful 4^th of July!

And remember: 

Lt. Cmdr. Charles Smith, again: “Questioning the system is the height of loyalty. The American system differs from other systems in that my loyalty is to defend the Constitution, not to follow orders. Our loyalty is to fairness.”

As the Federal Government's International Information Agency explains:

The legal system of the United States reflects the fundamental principle that the law is the creation of the people and designed to shield citizens from both tyranny and lawlessness, to protect freedom, and to enable society to conduct its affairs for the welfare of all.

The legal system rests, first and foremost, on the Constitution of the United States as the supreme law of the land. The U.S. Constitution is a single document, but it is also the basis for a vast body of law, precedent, and practice that makes up the American legal system.

A chief purpose of government, enshrined in the Bill of Rights and other amendments to the Constitution, is the protection of rights and freedoms of individuals. Among them: freedom of speech and of the press; freedom of religion; freedom of association; right to equal protection of the law; and right to due process and a fair trial.

The rule of law in the United States is founded on these principles which are enshrined in the Constitution, implemented by the laws of Congress and interpreted by the rulings of judges.

How we deal with crises is what defines us. We are defined as a country in times like this. Do you know who defended the British in the Boston Massacre? John Adams, who later became president. Firing into a crowd in Boston and killing five people was a pretty significant act. Eight British soldiers and their commanding officer were put on trial, but they couldn’t get anyone to defend them. Finally Adams agreed to do it. All but two were acquitted, and the others …received a branding on the thumb. Adams later called his defending them the greatest service he’ done for his country. He said that to convict those people under these conditions would have been as grave a stain on our reputation as the witchcraft trials of Salem.

Common Article 3 of Geneva aplies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. (See also the [Kennedy] concurrence: "The provision is part of a treaty the United States has ratified and thus accepted as binding law. By Act of Congress, moreover, violations of Common Article 3 are considered 'war crimes,' punishable as federal offenses, when committed by or against United States nationals and military personnel. See 18 U. S. C. § 2441.") This ruling has enormous implications for the Administration's detention and interrogation practices, because the Administration's legal conclusion that CA3 does not apply, and that we will not apply it as a matter of practice, was the key linchpin to the entire edifice of legal maneuvers that led to waterboarding, hypothermia, degradation, etc. See my post here. Per [the] decision, the Administration appears to have been engaged in war crimes, which are subejct to the death penalty. Although I don't think due process would allow prosecution based on conduct previously undertaken on [the Office of Legal Counsel's] advice that CA3 did not apply (after all, the Chief Justice concluded, in the D.C. Circuit, that CA3 did not apply), practices going forward are bound to change, and quick. (I'm sure the memos are being drafted and distributed in the CIA and DOD even as we "speak.")

Contrary to several blogs I've read, the Court did not hold that all of the protections of the Geneva Conventions apply to suspected Al Qaeda detainees, or that they are entitled to all of the protections of POWs. It held "merely" that the minimum baseline protections of Common Article 3 are binding -- which is a floor far, far higher than the practices of this Administration.

[Chris Matthews]:  I only have a minute here, sir, and I appreciate your position, and I‘m being tough with you because there is another side to this argument.  Let me ask you, do you believe that people who fight us as terrorists deserve Geneva Convention treatment?

[Lt. Cmdr. Smith]:  It‘s not whether they deserve it or not.  It‘s how we conduct ourselves.  It has to do where if we say that our opponent can cause us not to follow the rules anymore, then we‘ve lost who we are.  We‘re the good guys.  We‘re the guys who follow the rule and the people we fight are the bad guys and we show that every day when we follow the rules, regardless of what they do.  It‘s what sets us apart.  It‘s what makes us great and in my mind, it‘s what makes us undefeatable, ultimately.

At the White House, Press Secretary Tony Snow denied that Bush was using signing statements as backdoor way to "win" on issues after failing to persuade Congress to write legislation to his liking.

Snow also insisted that the president was merely fixing ``relatively minor" constitutional flaws that Congress had ``unwittingly" included in bills during the lawmaking process.

But in the Judiciary Committee hearing, Specter and several other senators focused on several high-profile signing statements in which Bush contradicted the direct intent of Congress. In particular, the committee repeatedly brought up Bush's signing statement in December on a torture ban.

Congress voted overwhelmingly to outlaw all forms of abusive interrogation techniques by US officials. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney fought the ban, asking Congress to allow the president to waive the ban under certain circumstances to preserve the president's ``flexibility" in the war on terrorism. But Congress rejected the waiver, passing an absolute ban in all circumstances.

When it became clear that the torture ban would pass, Bush called a press conference and said he supported it. But later, he issued a signing statement saying that he had the constitutional power, as commander-in-chief, to waive the ban in a situation where he felt harsh interrogation techniques were necessary to protect national security.

In Safavian's trial, it was revealed that in 2002, when he was chief of staff of the General Services Administration, the federal government's landlord agency, Abramoff approached him seeking a contract on behalf of a client to convert the Old Post Office building in Washington into an upscale hotel. The Abramoff client happened to be the Chitimacha Indian tribe.

LaTourette, who at the time was chairman of the House's public buildings subcommittee, became involved when he wrote one letter to the GSA and signed another urging that it consider giving ``HUBZone-qualified'' businesses preference on the Post Office project. A HUBZone contractor is a small business with offices in a historically economically disadvantaged area, such as an Indian reservation.

Needless to say, neither the Chitimacha Tribe nor the D.C. Post Office project have any connection to Ohio's 14th District.  LaTourette’s defense to charges of impropriety is a curious one: “`If Jack Abramoff himself came into my office asking me to sign a letter saying sunshine was good, would it make sunshine bad just because Abramoff wrote it?’''  I think that if Abramoff did that, it wouldn’t make sunshine bad, but one would have a legitimate point in questioning why LaTourette’ was wielding his clout on behalf of what Abramoff and his client, not any of his constituents, wanted. 

New York Times, June 24: “The top American commander in Iraq has drafted a plan that projects sharp reductions in the United States military presence there by the end of 2007, with the first cuts coming this September, American officials say.”

Henry Kissinger, October 22, 1972: “Peace is at hand.”

tit for [for] no net neutrality. In other words, the U.S. Congress is moving toward the elimination of net neutrality, which, in the end, will benefit companies like AT&T. So now, as a thank you, AT&T is upping its claims to customer's material.

I'm not typically a conspiracy theorist - I'm not sophisticated enough. But I swear, if I have alternatives to AT&T that will better protect what I believe should be protected, I'm counting the minutes until I can change ISPs. And don't go telling me that my idea of what should be protected is too expansive in a, you guessed it, post 9/11 world.

These pronouncements by these companies restrict my completely legal behavior, pure and simple. And that is what I object to. They restrict me by inducing a fear, anxiety and concern that anything and everything I do, no matter how innocent, will still be subject to review. I don't even do that to my kids, ever.

One of the most common intuitive problems people have with conspiracy theories is that they require positing such complicated webs of secret actions. If the twin towers fell in a carefully orchestrated demolition shortly after being hit by planes, who set the charges? Who did the planning? And how could hundreds, if not thousands of people complicit in the murder of their own countrymen keep quiet? Usually, Occam's razor intervenes.

"The War Tapes," a documentary about — and filmed by — a New Hampshire National Guard Unit stationed in Iraq that opened in theaters two weeks ago.

Specialist Mike Moriarty is filming his squad leader, Staff Sgt. Kevin Shangraw, as they bounce along in a Humvee. He asks his leader for his take on the broader mission, and Sergeant Shangraw comes straight off the dome with a government-issue rationale.

"Well, I think it's a fantastic opportunity for the Iraqis to establish a new history in the country and be able to be a free and democratic society, which in turn should stabilize the whole Middle East and create a freer and more stable earth as we know it."

"Tell me how you really feel," an unseen Specialist Moriarty prompts.

Sergeant. Shangraw waits a beat as the bleak landscape flies by in the window before answering.

"Then, after that happens, maybe we can buy everybody in the world a puppy."

I would feel a whole lot better if somebody in that chain of command had ever worn the uniform and gone to combat and held a dying boy in their arms and watched the life run out of his eyes while they lied to him and told him, “You're going to be all right."

[a]n analysis of the impact of institutional factors on the U.S./GVN response in Vietnam. Essentially both governments attempted to handle an atypical conflict situation by means of institutions designed for other purposes. Such constraints as institutional inertia — the inherent reluctance of organizations to change operational methods except slowly and incrementally — influenced not only the decisions made but what was actually done in the field. These constraints helped lead to

                       1..  an overly militarized response;

                        2.  diffusion of authority and fragmentation of command;

                        3.  hesitation to change the traditional relationship of civilian to military leadership; and

                        4.  agency reluctance to violate the conventional lines dividing responsibilities.

The conclusion is that atypical problems demand special solutions. Policymakers must be sure the institutions carrying out the policy can execute it as intended. Adequate follow-through machinery must exist at all levels, to force adaptation if necessary. Where the United States is supporting an enfeebled ally, effective means of stimulating optimum indigenous performance are essential.

In China, during the 9th Century AD, a man named Wang Jie copied a book significant to his Buddhist religion. Translated from the Sanskrit, the title of Wang Jie's book is The Perfection of Wisdom which Cuts Like a Thunderbolt. It is the earliest dated book in the world today and is commonly called the Diamond Sutra. It is at the British Library in London.

The book's inscription is interesting:

Reverently caused to be made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 13th of the 14th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong [May 11, 868 AD].

I am a quiet Muslim — I've never waged war, let alone an asymmetrical one. I wasn't anti-American before and, miraculously, I haven't become anti-American since. In Guantánamo, I did see some people for whom jihad is life itself, people whose minds are distorted by extremism and whose souls are full of hatred. But the huge majority of the faces I remember — the ones that haunt my nights — are of desperation, suffering, incomprehension turned into silent madness.

I believe that a small number of the detainees at Guantánamo are guilty of criminal acts, but as analysis of the military's documents on the prisoners has shown, there is no evidence that most of the 465 or so men there have committed hostile acts against the United States or its allies. Even so, what I heard so many times resounding from cage to cage, what I said myself so many times in my moments of complete despondency, was not, "Free us, we are innocent!" but "Judge us for whatever we've done!" There is unlimited cruelty in a system that seems to be unable to free the innocent and unable to punish the guilty.

The US Department of Defense [official website] has rejected a demand by Amnesty International [advocacy website] for an independent investigation into last weekend's three detainee suicides [JURIST report] at the Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detention center. A Pentagon spokesman said Tuesday that no independent probe was needed and maintained that the military would investigate the deaths itself. Military officials have also asserted that the detainees purposefully concealed their suicides [JURIST report] from guards. In calling for an independent inquiry [press release], Amnesty also criticized remarks by US officials characterizing the suicides as acts of warfare [Telegraph report] waged to elicit sympathy and reiterated the group's position that the detention facility should be closed.

This Administration determines these people are neither criminals nor prisoners of war, inferring that though captured and confined they are entitled to neither criminal due process nor the minimal standards of care due prisoners of war; so, voila, they are entitled to no due process, no minimal standards of care, and the entire matter is not subject to review by the courts or by Congress.  The military, the guys responsible for whatever happened, will investigate themselves. That is un-American.  Why the hell don’t we shut Guantanamo down?

To pick up a recent theme: what did they think would happen?  Of course, the suicides were "quite predictable."  War is fucked up. Incidentally, my dad has added to my understanding of the term "snafu."  The common response among the GI's to the question "how's it going?", he reports, was "SNAFU FUBAR"

It has occurred to me in light of my last June 9 and June 10 posts that one thing liberal America is injured by politically is the perception we're unpatriotic.  Few accusations hurt me more and are more unfair.  I was raised believing this is the greatest country in the world.  My grandparents came from extremely humble circumstances, abandoning homes their families had lived in for generations and coming to the U.S. with nothing.  Here's the passenger information for my late uncle, who arrived at Ellis Island on December 3, 1922 along with his parents, my paternal grandparents:

First Name: Moritz

Last Name: Friedman

Ethnicity: Polish

Last Place of Residence: Jelenkowate, E. Galicia

Date of Arrival: Dec 03, 1922

Age at Arrival:  4m    

Gender:  M    

Marital Status:  S  

Ship of Travel: Lapland

Port of Departure: Antwerp Manifest Line Number: 0008

My father, about whom I've written previously, was born 2 years later in Cleveland, where my grandparents had settled after spending about a year in Sharon, Pennsylvania.  My paternal grandfather's arrival in Cleveland was a homecoming after a true Odyssey.  He'd been dragged into the Imperial and Royal Army of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary during WWI, captured by the Russians, and held in a prisoner of war camp in Siberia.  In 1918, after Lenin had seized power and signed a peace treaty with the Germans, the Bolsheviks let the Russian POW's go.  But all they did was open the gates and tell the POW's they were free to leave.  My grandfather was, literally, thousands of miles from where he'd grown up.  He mostly walked, trying to avoid the ongoing civil war between the Bolsheviks and the Whites.  Along the way he would stop in villages and try to find a synagogue. (A few Siberian synagogues are pictured here.)  In one, also in Siberia, on a Sabbath Eve, he met my future grandmother, whose family had been evacuated to there from the German/Russian front.  They continued the journey together back to my grandfather's birthplace.  They arrived years later to find my grandfather's family gone.  The family had assumed their son was dead, but on the off chance he would turn up some day, they'd left word with a neighbor of their new address in Sharon, Pennsylvania, USA.  My grandparents continued their journey, had my uncle along the way, and after settling in Cleveland never moved again for the rest of their lives.  They never wanted to.  And here I find myself too these 84 years later. 

Interestingly, my father was a POW too.  He was an American G.I. captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.  His trip eastward through the Nazi POW system included a stay in Stalag IX-B, where the Germans segregated the Jewish POW’s.  Some threw away their dogtags, which identified them by their religion.  My dad didn’t.  He wanted his body to be identifiable after he died so that his parents wouldn’t wonder forever what had happened to him.  But he was lucky.  He passed through Stalag IX-B just a couple of weeks before the Germans started sending Jewish-American prisoners from there to Berga, a concentration camp, where a vast number of them died.  My dad was liberated on April 1, 1945, nearly starved but counting himself so lucky he swears to this day he hasn’t had a bad day since.  He had become good friends with Charles Guggenheim during basic training in Alabama.  Guggenheim never made it to Europe thanks to a leg infection, but he later become one of the most accomplished documentary filmmakers of our age and, shortly before his death, completed his film on Berga.

It's fitting, I think, that my Hebrew name, Baruch, means "blessed."  And "Friedman" means "man of peace."

We got to make this land a better land
Than the world in which we live.
And we got to help each man be a better man
With the kindness that we give.

I know we can make it.
I know darn well we can work it out.
Oh yes we can, I know we can can
Yes we can can, why can't we?

Of course I listened to American Routes on my local NPR affiliate, and this morning I read that Congress, after a week trying to eliminate the estate tax and pass an anti-gay constitutional amendment, is now trying to eliminate PBS and NPR.  Just what we need: to abandon the airwaves to the private broadcasters who have bought off Congress. 

ADDENDUM: Molly Ivins on the difference between the priorities of the Republican-controlled Congress and the priorities of the vast majority of the country.

James Madison wrote in Federalist Paper No. 47:

"The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many...may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

That extraordinary powers have, under Bush, been accumulated in the "same hands" is now undeniable. For the first time in more than thirty years, and to a greater extent than even then, our constitutional form of government is in jeopardy.

She's also trained me well so that Ender is remarkably well behaved and happy.

Amy, as I've previously mentioned, has produced a CD entitled Tell Me a Story comprised of eight folktales read by stage and screen's most talented actors and music by renowned composer Laura Hall.  It's a must if you have kids. You can read more about it and buy it here.  Amy wrote the stories, which are a mere fraction of the near thousand folktales she has written weekly over the years for syndication in over 100 North American newspapers as Tell Me a Story (illustrated by Jillian Gilliland).  You can read her new stories weekly online here or buy the 2 published collections of the stories or one of Amy's other books here or here.  Here's an excerpt from an interview with Amy in connection with the new CD:

Is there an underlying message you wish to convey with these stories?

Amy:

The truthful answer is yes. But there’s more than one. First, maybe most vividly, the message is that people should involve themselves in community, should resist the lure of selfishness and self-involvement to work together; a little bit the message is not only in the stories but in the whole collaborative result—in what quality results when a group of people working together to create, whether it’s a CD or a better world.

Second, and this surprised Lori, Laura and me, but after recording, we discovered that we had created a dynamic we hadn’t exactly intended but were pleased to find. Zena in A Sense of Theft, Hannah in A Clever Girl, Sal in The Boatman’s Howling Daughter, and The Selkie Bride are such dynamic, optimistic, truthful, powerful women that their energy seems to fuel the CD, making it tilt, perhaps a little, toward the female. An 11-year-old girl told me the other day that she loved the CD. “I’m like Sal,” she said, “and like Hannah. And my name’s Hannah…” She was grinning, ear to ear. But then her brother said, “I like Gregory, the raccoon,” and I remembered that we have a lot of fabulous male stuff in there too.

The bottom line message, ultimately, is that kindness, generosity, curiosity, determination and wisdom are far better traits to possess, and ultimately bring far greater gifts, than do selfishness, greed, and fear.

Republican rainmaker Tom Noe lost his political prestige and much more Wednesday when he admitted that he funneled illegal campaign contributions to President Bush's re-election campaign. . . . Federal prosecutors said Wednesday that Noe funneled $45,400 out of his own pocket to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign at a Columbus fund-raiser in October 2003. . . . Noe's plea to the federal charges will not affect his case in Lucas County Common Pleas Court, where he is charged with racketeering and stealing nearly $2.3 million from a $50 million investment in rare coins that he managed for the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation. . . . Federal prosecutors said they were unable to determine whether Noe used any state investment money for the illegal Bush contributions.

Dale Chihuly's "Bel Fiore Studio Edition"

In the 2003 9th Circuit case referred to by the New York Times article quoted above, Satava v. Lowry (pdf), the court held that the California glass artist Richard Satava could not stop Christopher Lowry from making glass jellyfish sculptures that many people confused with Satava's glass jellyfish scultpures.  The court held that "Satava may not prevent others from copying aspects of his sculptures resulting from either jellyfish physiology or from their depiction in the glass-in-glass medium." Id. at 3927.  The court went on to conclude that Satava's "selection [in his jellyfish scuptures] of the clear glass, oblong shroud, bright colors, proportion, vertical orientation, and stereotyped jellyfish form, considered together, lacks the quantum of originality needed to merit copyright protection. . . . These elements are so commonplace in glass-in-glass sculpture and so typical of jellyfish physiology that to recognize copyright protection in their combination effectively would give Satava a monopoly on lifelike glass-in-glass sculptures of single jellyfish with vertical tentacles. . . . Because the quantum of originality Satava added in combining these standard and stereotyped elements must be considered “trivial” under our case law, Satava cannot prevent other artists from combining them. (citations and footnote omitted.)" Id. at 3928-29. 

Addendum:  Over at Althouse, there's a lively discussion going on over Chihuly's lawsuit, largely about whether, in contrast to Satava's jellyfish sculptures, Chihuly's sculptures add some measure of originality over and above their natural models that is more than "trivial" under the case law and whether it is those "original" components that Chihuly's former collaborators are copying.  Professor Althouse is convinced Chihuly's sculptures do add more than a trivial measure of originality to nature.  I'm not so sure.  See, for example, this pictorial travelogue of the sea that includes a photo of one Chihuly piece that to my eye (as, no doubt the site’s authors intended) is virtually indistinguishable from undersea life forms.  I have no idea whether, even assuming Chihuly added to nature, it is those additions his former collaborators copied.  Surely he can't copyright the idea of any glass sculpture that would mimic (including varying degrees of exaggeration) existing life forms.  The more I think about it, the more I think Chihuly's case is bunk.  His former collaborators aren't selling their sculptures as "Chihully's," and no doubt the prices they command are far lower than his.  (Though, perhaps, his market may suffer at the wide publicity given to the fact (well-known to the in-crowd) Chihouly doesn't actually blow his sculptures.)  Are they exact copies of Chihuly's work?  If so, maybe Chihuly wins.  If not, could he possibly prevail?

Douglas Kmiec , who as head of the Office of Legal Counsel helped develop the Reagan administration's strategy of issuing signing statements more frequently, said he disapproves of the ``provocative" and sometimes ``disingenuous" manner in which the Bush administration is using them.

Kmiec said the Reagan team's goal was to leave a record of the president's understanding of new laws only in cases where an important statute was ambiguous. Kmiec rejected the idea of using signing statements to contradict the clear intent of Congress, as Bush has done. Presidents should either tolerate provisions of bills they don't like, or they should veto the bill, he said.

``Following a model of restraint, [the Reagan-era Office of Legal Counsel] took it seriously that we were to construe statutes to avoid constitutional problems, not to invent them," said Kmiec, who is now a Pepperdine University law professor.

By contrast, Bush has used the signing statements to waive his obligation to follow the new laws. In addition to the torture ban and oversight provisions of the Patriot Act, the laws Bush has claimed the authority to disobey include restrictions against US troops engaging in combat in Colombia, whistle-blower protections for government employees, and safeguards against political interference in taxpayer-funded research.

"Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

--Sir Winston Churchill

  

Here's an interesting story about Diane Arbus and some of her subjects, including those twins whose image was later "borrowed" by Stanley Kubrick to such great effect.  The writer of the story, David Segal, provides a reasonable but not all that radical interpretation of the photos, rejecting the view that Arbus was simply an exploitive voyeur:  "What's it like to land in this hallowed collection of 'freaks,' as Arbus once referred to her subjects? It depends on which 'freak' you ask, it turns out. The great recurring theme of Arbus's work is a sense of otherness, and if you talk to a few of her subjects you realize that in some cases she discovered that otherness in people and then committed it to film, and in other cases she somehow imposed it."  What's remarkable in the article is the eloquence with which "the boy with the hand grenade," Colin Wood, now a 50 year old insurance agent living in Glendale, California, interprets Arbus:

"She catches me in a moment of exasperation. It's true, I was exasperated. My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding. She saw that and it's like . . . commiseration. She captured the loneliness of everyone. It's all people who want to connect but don't know how to connect. And I think that's how she felt about herself. She felt damaged and she hoped that by wallowing in that feeling, through photography, she could transcend herself."

John Yoo tries to answer this by insisting that the purported intentions of political actors from centuries past provide “a more flexible, dynamic approach” to addressing the crises of today. Yet what has this “flexibility” achieved? As Philippe Sands demonstrates in Lawless World, it has justified torture in Abu Ghraib and prisoner abuse in Guantánamo Bay; it has sponsored a disastrous and arguably illegal war; it has under-written extraordinary rendition and secret CIA prisons; it has placed terrorist suspects in a legal limbo and American citizens under unwarranted surveillance. If these are the achievements of “flexibility”, then we need to recall Sands’s defence of the virtues of restraint. Restraint, after all, lies at the core of the rule of law.

 Quite frankly, Blackwell frightens me and, as I'm told, many other black people who have paid attention to what he represents.

His entire political career has been inside the cozy club of conservatives who stand in opposition to what rank-and-file black voters say they value most.

Sure, many black voters are overwhelmingly conservative on social issues like abortion and gay rights.

But pressing those buttons won't make most black voters overlook that Blackwell and his right-wing cronies want to cut taxes without regard to the violence that would do to public education, health-care and social-service programs.

Few black voters will forgive Blackwell for trying to suppress the black turnout in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. As Ohio's Secretary of State, he served as the Republican National Committee's leading storm trooper in the state, paving the way for George Bush to seize control of the White House.

In an ironic twist, Blackwell is now asking those black voters to help him make history by becoming Ohio's first black governor.

Such a naked appeal won't hide his real character.

Black voters would be wise to recall the late Justice Thurgood Marshall Jr., who warned of Negroes who suck up to the enemies of their people.

"There's no difference between a black snake and a white snake," Marshall said. "They both bite."

Whereas, the context in which this Agreement arises in the parties’ desire to reserve for Apple Corps’ field of use for its Trade Marks, the record business, The Beatles, Apple Corps’ catalog and artists and related material all as set forth in section 1.3 herein and to reserve for Apple Computers field of use for its Trade Marks, the computer, data processing and telecommunications business as set forth in section 1.2 herein and to coordinate the use of their respective Trade Marks in such fields of use as set forth in section 4 herein.

"Accordingly, the parties agree as follows:

1. DEFINITIONS

2. "Apple Computer Field of Use"  means (i) electronic goods, including but not limited to computers, microprocessors and microprocessor controlled devices, telecommunications equipment, data processing equipment, ancillary and peripheral equipment, and computer software of any kind on any medium; (ii) data processing services, data transmission services, broadcasting services, telecommunications services; (iii) ancillary services relating to any of the foregoing, including without limitation, training, education, maintenance, repair, financing and distribution; (iv) printed matter relating to any of the foregoing goods or services; and (v) promotional merchandising relating to the foregoing.

3."Apple Corps Field of Use" means (i) the Apple Musical Artists; the Apple Catalog; personalities or characters which appear in or are derived from the Apple Catalog; the names likenesses, voices or musical sounds of the Apple Musical Artists; any musical works or performances of the Apple Musical Artists; (ii) any current or future creative works whose principal content is music and/or musical performances; regardless of the means by which those works are recorded, or communicated, whether tangible or intangible; (iii) promotional merchandise relating to any of the foregoing; (iv) merchandising relating to the Apple Musical Artists and the Apple Catalog and the related subject matter set forth in subsection (i), including, without limitation, the commercial exploitation of personalities, characters, names, designs, images, words, photographs, drawings, or other materials through articles such as posters, toys, games (including computer games), novelties, figures, figurines and clothing; and (v) printed matter relating to any of the foregoing goods or services.

The dispositive question seems to have been whether i-Tunes constitutes “creative work[] whose principal content is music and/or musical performances.”  The court reasonably (but not inarguably) concluded that i-Tunes is a delivery system, not “creative work.”  As a delivery system, I suppose it’s one of those “ancillary services” relating to a “data transmission service” that fall within Apple Computer’s “field of use.”  Of course the fact the agreement was written in 1991 complicates these matters; I wonder whether something like i-Tunes was even conceivable in 1991. 

It does drive me a little nuts that with all the coverage of this lawsuit no one seems to have bothered doing what I always tell my Contracts students to do in analyzing contractual disputes: start with the language of the contract.

Jack Cloonan, a 27-year veteran of the FBI who, in New York, as senior agent on the FBI's bin Laden squad, headed the investigation of the master Al Qaeda strategist Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Cloonan had been directing the interrogation of Mohammed in a once secret CIA interrogation center at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan (which Dana Priest exposed in The Washington Post). [link added]

Concerned at the time about the network of still hidden CIA interrogation centers around the world, Cloonan asked: "What are we going to do with these people when we're finished . . . with them? Are they going to disappear? Are they stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to people when they start asking questions about where they are? Are they dead? Are they alive? What oversight does Congress have?"

Somewhere in a secret prison sits Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of the attacks. Our government could bring him to trial either here in the United States or in the Hague. It could use the trial to demonstrate not only the terrible hatred that drives Al Qaeda to murder so many innocents around the world. It could use a trial to reveal the depth and breadth of the ideological threat that we face in coming years. It could show how we can avoid such vulnerability in the future. A Khalid Sheik Mohammad conviction would be deeply meaningful and satisfying.

Best of all, it could demonstrate to the world that despite so much recent evidence to the contrary, the United States is a nation of laws and its governmental agents are not above either our laws or international laws. They whole world thinks we have given up on the concept of justice. We could use a decent trial to show otherwise.

The reason we have not done this may be very disturbing: in our haste to be brutal and stupid, we almost certainly tortured Mohammad, rendering him unconvictable in any decent court in any decent country. We have also held him and hundreds more for more than three years without counsel, without facing charges, without a chance to respond to accusations, and without even allowing their families to know that they are in custody.

So basically, we are unable to try the real killer, even though we know who he is and we have him in custody.

[P]racticalities aside, the point is -- why isn't war for oil not only morally permissible, but morally required, if the forcible redistibution of wealth in other ways (including "windfall profit" taxes -- or Evo Morales' seizure of natural gas wells in Bolivia) is OK?

Looks like the people who matter and have looked more closely than I at the books don’t buy Kaavya Viswanathan’s explanations for her literary borrowing.  Her novel has been withdrawn and her book contract canceled.  And “in a statement issued Tuesday, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, ‘based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act.’ He said that there were more than 40 passages in Viswanathan's book "that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books." Ross called it "nothing less than an act of literary identity theft."

Malcolm Gladwell apparently wondered along lines similar to mine and feels similarly chastened.

One of the insanely annoying phrases lefties overuse is "Speaking truth to power." Well, kids, you know what? Standing three feet from the most powerful man in the world and poking fun at his public foibles, telling your audience that they are cowards by doing nothing more than pointing out the truth of their actions -- THAT'S speaking truth to power. Mutter to yourselves all you want, civilians. Colbert, that night, became one of the stories comics will trade for literally decades to come. Young comics will learn it from old comics. Audiences come and go. We honor our own.

May 1, 2003:

I'm writting about this partly because I think that an innocent young woman is being unfairly condemned, but there is a larger issue at stake here too, namely the increasing privatization of our common culture. No creative work, whether scientific or literary, is the exclusive product of any single individual, or even of a large group of individuals, such as a corporation. All such works build on a tradition of thousands of years created by innumerable people, from which they draw ideas, facts, words, and expressions. It is in the nature of culture for people to make use of elements of previous work in composing new ones, whether by reciting the same facts, presenting or disagreeing with the same ideas, pursuing the same themes and plots, and using the same words and expressions. In music one piece is influenced by another, sometimes only in broad matters of style or performance, sometimes in reusing sequences of a few notes.

It is reasonable to demand that people not present as their innovation ideas that they have taken from others, and in some situations, for economic reasons, to impose restrictions like those of copyright law, but we must recognize that fundamentally everyone borrows from others and that this is normal and proper. To deny this is what leads to absurdities like the claim that the heirs to the man who coined the mathematical term googol should receive royalties from Google, or to the increasingly greedy and invasive demands of some segments of the entertainment industry for "protection" of their "rights", the latest of which is the Bush Administration's Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 recently introduced in Congress, which "strengthens" (makes more virulent) the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which a report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to restrict free speech and stifle innovation. The idea that people should "own" sequences of 14 words or four musical notes or words pronounced the same as googol is not only ridiculous, it runs counter to the entire history of human civilization.

In a legal writing course, students want timely and detailed individual feedback. They want to see their professors working as hard as they're working. They want to not be penalized harshly for making mistakes that they cannot avoid making. They want a coach, a mentor, and a guide who will root for them to do their best; they do not want an assessor or a dispenser of penalties. They want help, tempered by sound criticism, and they want someone to want them to do better by virtue of hard work and perseverance. They want clear expectations and firm guidance. They want someone who will still like and respect them if they're not the best in the class. But they don't want a friend -- they want a teacher.

Washington Post, April 23, 2994

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just days ago called [Teodoro] Obiang [Nguema of Equatorial Guinea] a "good friend" while being photographed beaming at his side during his visit to her office. . . . Obiang seized power by murdering his predecessor and uncle, Francisco Macias Nguema. Obiang was Macias's chief of police and ran the notorious Black Beach prison, where Macias reportedly showed up to execute prisoners by smashing their heads with concrete poles. Now Obiang runs a police state of his own, surrounded by Moroccan bodyguards because he doesn't trust anyone, even his own family.

He survives in part because his tiny country pumps 350,000 barrels of oil a day and has reserves of 1.2 billion barrels, along with 1.3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. As a result, oil companies and governments are willing to support a regime that has long since silenced the press, driven almost a third of its population of 540,000 into exile and crushed any hint of dissent. 

 Shaking Hands: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein greets Donald Rumsfeld, then special envoy of President Ronald Reagan, in Baghdad on December 20, 1983.

[I]t is not meaningful to talk about the function of a single gene in isolation. Genes only function in the context of the organism. There is no single gene for an eye, a limb, or language, much less such tendencies as homosexuality. Genes function in relation to other genes and intercellular signals, much as words vary in meaning and function depending on the way they are used in sentences and the contexts in which they are spoken. It is the combinations of gene activity, which may be different in different species, that create the form of the organism. "We can begin to think of individual groups—insects, spiders, and centipedes, or birds, mammals, and reptiles, as well as their long extinct fossil relatives—not so much in terms of their uniqueness, but as variations on a common theme," Carroll writes. And surprising, too, is the evidence that all animals, from worms to humans, probably descend from one or a few primitive bacteria. Darwin would have been pleased to discover molecular evidence for his "common descent."

The survey, conducted by the Federal Judicial Center, was based on the responses of 278 federal district court judges. Seventy percent of the respondents called groundless litigation either a "small problem" or a "very small problem," and 15% said it was no problem at all. Only 1% called it a "very large problem," 2% called it a "large problem" and the rest rated it as a "moderate problem" in their courts.

Are these protestors serious? Not a single person with a working brain ("working" being the key word) would listen to them. So right now you are thinking to yourself, "But Boggs that puts a lot of people into the non-working-brain category" and my response is "Yes it does." I believe there is an objectively true or false position on all of the protestors' causes, be it the merits of the U.S. Military being in Iraq or Palestinian rights to Israeli land. What is there to protest? I would rather see a debate instead. Give us your best anti-whatever person and we will give you our best you've-got-to-be-kidding-me-they-still-believe-this guy and they can duke it out. I am willing to bet that the truth will win out and the anti-guy will cower under name calling and murmuring something about blood, oil, and imperialism.

Since I have protested the Iraq War since before it began, I guess I've been "objectively" diagnosed as a person in "the non-working brain category."  But is the only problem really that there were protests?  Boggs would rather have "debate" than "protest."  Does this guy have a clue how many ways debate plays out in a working democracy?

Boggs goes on, stupefyingly: "After the surface arguments of the protestors are gone what do they have left to grab hold of? What is there besides ignorant claims and made up arguments? I believe when any one of their arguments are broken down to it's [sic] base form there are only feelings instead of facts."  And, of course, Boggs believes "that there will come a time when it will be proven that Saddam had WMD or at the very least was very close to having them."  I know I don't have a brain, that I'm simply driven by irrational feelings, and that I'm brainwashed by the MSM, but somehow matters like Cobra II come to light and show, in the words of the Columbus Dispatch, how "the Bush administration drove the nation to war in Iraq, and how decisions made before the invasion and immediately after Saddam"s ouster precipitated the vicious insurgency now wracking the country. It makes for unsettling reading. In richly detailed prose, the authors present a damning indictment of the Bush administration's national security team."

The Congress of the United States of America passed and the President of the United States of America signed into law the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005(the "Act"). It became fully effective on October 17, 2005. Those responsible for the passing of the Act did all in their power to avoid the proffered input from sitting United States Bankruptcy Judges, various professors of bankruptcy law at distinguished universities, and many professional associations filled with the best of the bankruptcy lawyers in the country as to the perceived flaws in the Act. This is because the parties pushing the passage of the Act had their own agenda. It was apparently an agenda to make more money off the backs of the consumers in this country. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Act has been highly criticized across the country. In this writer's opinion, to call the Act a "consumer protection" Act is the grossest of misnomers.

This amicus brief argues that the legislative history of the DTA supports the Government's position. Specifically, the brief cites a lengthy colloquy between Senators Kyl and Graham themselves which purportly took place during a Senate floor debate just prior to passage of the bill. In the exchange, both Kyl and Graham suggest that the bill will strip the courts of jurisdiction over pending detainee cases such as Hamdan. But here's where the story gets interesting.

Apparently this entire 8 page colloquy--which is scripted to read as if it were delivered live on the floor of the Senate, complete with random interruptions from other Senators--never took place. It was inserted into the Congressional Record in written form just prior to passage of the bill.

I hate to get all lit-crit very often, but if this item (from the Drudge Report) isn't a hoax (by Capla Kesting Fine Art and/or artist Daniel Edwards), it's as good an argument as I've ever seen for the greater importance of art's meaning in the minds of its audience than in its creator's mind: "A nude Britney Spears on a bearskin rug while giving birth to her firstborn marks a ‘first’ for Pro-Life. Pop-star Britney Spears is the “ideal” model for Pro-Life and the subject of a dedication at Capla Kesting Fine Art in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg gallery district, in what is proclaimed the first Pro-Life monument to birth."  Surely the pornographic depiction of Britney Spears in childbirth can't be unironic, and are we really celebrating Britney Spears as the epitome of a pro-family culture?  “'A superstar at Britney’s young age having a child is rare in today’s celebrity culture. This dedication honors Britney for the rarity of her choice and bravery of her decision,'” said gallery co-director, Lincoln Capla."  This can't really be meant seriously as pro-life art, can it?  If this is the same Daniel Edwards, I seriouly doubt it: at the end of the statement in support of the exhibit he curated depicting Ted Williams' death mask, he invokes P.T. Barnum as his inspiration.

Dennis Hastert on the floor of the House of Representatives, three years ago today:

We know that in Iraq Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. We know that he has a nexus to al Qaeda, and we know that that training has been going on over an extended period of time. I believe that it is our duty, this Nation's duty, to protect our Nation and to make sure that that is not visited upon this Nation ever again.

Addendum: Pollyanna pundits.

The pattern is a familiar one from other countries. An endeavor once considered the epitome of patriotism leads to a quagmire. Sobriety and sadness replace euphoria. Arguments that once turned dissidents into pariahs now seem obvious . . . [N]ational leaders have eroded the rule of law in pursuit of what they considered a patriotic goal.

It’s the former, but the sentiment is clearly present in both.  Krugman goes further, however, because from its start supporters of the Iraq War have dismissed him and other opponents as unpatriotic.  In connection with Bruce Bartlett, the long-time Republican operator who’s now calling the Bush administration “unconscionable,” “irresponsible,” “vindictive,” and “inept,” Krugman writes:

[I]f you’re a former hawk who now concedes that the administration exaggerated the threat from Iraq, you’re to be applauded for your open-mindedness.  But if you warned three years ago that the administration was hyping the case for war, you were a conspiracy theorist.

Every American blogger whom I found discussing [David Irving’s sentence] – from the left wing to the Far Right and everything in between – was in complete agreement regarding this event. They all unambiguously expressed the opinion that while those who deny or downplay the Holocaust are deplorable, nobody should be imprisoned or prosecuted by the State for expressing an idea, no matter how repugnant the idea might be. That sort of trans-ideological consensus is almost unheard of these days with regard to any issue, and it raises what I think are several extremely interesting and important points.

I have argued many times that a recognition of the dangers of the Bush Administration’s theories of lawlessness and its law-breaking behavior -- both as part of the NSA scandal and beyond -- is not based upon liberal or conservative political beliefs but, instead, is compelled by the most fundamental and defining American principles of government. That is not some "framing" ploy or effort to "triangulate" a partisan political controversy by elevating it above petty partisan disputes. Rather, objections to the Administration's theories of power are grounded in non-ideological premises because what is so offensive about the Administration’s conduct and theories of power is not that they are liberal or conservative -- they are manifestly neither. Instead, both the Administration's law-breaking and its justifications for that law-breaking constitute a profound assault on the core principles of government on which our country was founded and which has governed the country since its inception.

I have spent my life loving this country for its values, among them the right not to be tossed in jail at the whim of some ruler, but to be guaranteed the right to live free from searches, wiretapping, surveillance, and arrest unless some official could convince a judge that there was probable cause to believe that I had committed a crime. I could scarcely believe it when Padilla was locked up: I was as shocked as I would have been had Bush asserted the right to ban Lutheranism, or to close down the New York Times. It was such a complete betrayal of our country's core values that it took my breath away. I feel the same way about the NSA story.

that anybody who professes that a particular point of moral conviction is not discussable, not debatable, not negotiable, simply because it is the word of God, or because the Bible says so, or because "that is what all Muslims (Hindus, Sikhs...) believe, and I am a Muslim (Hindu, Sikh...)" should be seen to be making it impossible for the rest of us to take their views seriously, excusing themselves from the moral conversation, inadvertently acknowledging that their own views are not conscientiously maintained and deserve no further hearing.

The argument is straightforward. Suppose I have a friend, Fred, who is (in my carefully considered opinion) always right. If I tell you I'm against stem-cell research because "my friend Fred says it's wrong, and that's all there is to it," you will just look at me as if I were missing the point of the discussion. I have not given you a reason that, in good faith, I could expect you to appreciate. Suppose you believe that stem-cell research is wrong because God has told you so. Even if you are right — that is, even if God does exist and has, personally, told you that stem-cell research is wrong — you cannot reasonably expect others who do not share your faith or experience to accept that as a reason. The fact that your faith is so strong that you cannot do otherwise just shows (if you really can't) that you are disabled for moral persuasion, a sort of robotic slave to a meme that you are unable to evaluate. And if you reply that you can, but you won't consider reasons for and against your conviction (because it is God's word, and it would be sacrilegious even to consider whether it might be in error), you avow your willful refusal to abide by the minimal conditions of rational discussion. Either way, your declarations of your deeply held views are posturings that are out of place, part of the problem, not part of the solution, and we others will just have to work around you as best we can.

Addendum: It may be Kafka's world for certain Guantanamo detainees, but it might well be Gary Larsen's world for certain drivers.

"At the time [of the killings] I said I was against retribution," said Benjamin Berger, who retired this month after 63 years of practicing internal medicine.

"And I feel the same way now. I think Spielberg has the right Idea. I just don't know how successful he will be in getting that message across. Israelis think it's too pro-Arab and Arabs think it's too pro-Israel."

A New York Times article dated August 9, 2004 detailed the Bush administration's close relationship with the coal mining industry. While the piece largely focused on environmental issues, it still makes it clear that administration's concern for the health and safety of coal miners took a back seat to their concern for the bank accounts of their allies at the mining companies.

In 1997, as a top executive of a Utah mining company, David Lauriski proposed a measure that could allow some operators to let coal-dust levels rise substantially in mines. The plan went nowhere in the government.

Last year, it found enthusiastic backing from one government official - Mr. Lauriski himself. Now head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, he revived the proposal despite objections by union officials and health experts that it could put miners at greater risk of black-lung disease....

Safety and environmental regulations often shift with control of the White House, but the Bush administration's approach to coal mining has been a particularly potent example of the blend of politics and policy.

In addition to Mr. Lauriski, who spent 30 years in the coal industry, Mr. Bush tapped a handful of other industry executives and lobbyists to help oversee safety and environmental regulations.

In all, the mine safety agency has rescinded more than a half-dozen proposals intended to make coal miners' jobs safer, including steps to limit miners' exposure to toxic chemicals. One rule pushed by the agency would make it easier for companies to use diesel generators underground, which miners say could increase the risk of fire.

In an interview, Mr. Lauriski said that the proposals that were canceled were unnecessary. He said the agency had instead concentrated on other measures "we believed were important to pursue."...

Over the last six years, coal companies have donated $9 million to federal political candidates and party organizations, and 90 percent has gone to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

More to the point, one of the "unnecessary" proposals canceled by the mining executive Bush appointed to head the MSHA was a Clinton-era rule titled "Escapeways and Refuges." It dealt specifically with "methane ignition" and "entrapment deaths." (Emphasis mine.)

"This standard would revise and clarify an existing standard that requires underground metal and nonmetal mines to have at least two separate exits to the surface. Because of the physical limits in underground mines, fire, massive ground fall, methane ignition, inundation, for example, could result in multiple entrapment deaths. A second escapeway increases the likelihood that miners will not be trapped underground during an emergency if one escape route is cut off."

In December of 2001, under the leadership of Lauriski, it was withdrawn from the agenda due to "changing safety and health regulatory priorities." In other words, increased regulation of the mining industry was seen as a roadblock to increased profits.

[Now,] it's come to the media's attention that the Sago Mine "was cited 208 times for alleged safety violations in 2005." The Labor Department has said that a whopping 96 of those citations were "significant and substantial." In fact, some of them may have been directly related to the situation at hand.

It was to be a "war" without end. No one ever attempted to define what "victory" might actually consist of, though we were assured that the war itself would, like the Cold War, last generations. Even the recent sudden presidential announcement that we will now settle only for "complete victory" in Iraq is, in this context, a distinctly limited goal because Iraq has already been defined as but a single "theater" (though a "central" one) in a larger war on terror. A war without end, of course, left the President as a commander-in-chief-without-end and it was in such a guise that the acolytes of that "obscure philosophy" of total presidential power planned to claim their "inherent" constitutional right to do essentially anything.

Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.